I just saw Nicholas Sparks’ The Lucky One, which made me wonder, does he have a favorite among the movies that have been made from his books?
—Janelle MacLeod, Portland, Maine
Sparks, 46, who has had six movies made from his books, and one movie script that he wrote—The Last Song—and turned into a book for a total of seven films, doesn’t play favorites, so the answer is no.
“I think that one of the great things about the films that have been made from my books is that they all tend to have legs [longevity],” says the Omaha, Neb.-born author, who lives in North Carolina. “You will see Message in a Bottle on cable TV 15 times a year, A Walk To Remember 25 times and The Notebook 40. It’s because they’ve all have been good. I’ve been very fortunate.”
That means that close to half of Sparks’ books have been turned into movies, but even with that success rate, Sparks says when he sits down to write, he doesn’t picture any specific actor playing his characters. “The only time I ever knew for sure [who would play the part] was Miley Cyrus in Last Song and that was because that was a deal worked out as a vehicle for Miley,” he says. “I knew Miley would be in it and then, when I actually wrote the script before I wrote the novel, when I was writing the novel, obviously, I had Miley in mind.”
Sparks, who met his wife Cathy on a Monday night during spring break in Florida when he was in college and told her on Tuesday that they would be married, says she is the inspiration for many of his heroines. The man known for his romantic fiction credits part of his success to the fact that, “when I sit down to write a novel, I want it to feel very real, that it could happen to anyone, anywhere.”
